I've been tracking my spending for almost 3 years. I started using a free app called Spending Tracker. With this I have to manually enter everything. At the time I was afraid of linking my accounts to an app like Mint. I found that manually entering my expenses made me extra aware of what I was spending my money on and what categories it was going into. It's very tedious, but after a few weeks it just became a habit. I'm still doing it, even though I signed up for Personal Capital and Mint a couple of months ago to steam line the process.

One can use anything manual or software. but if you're not committed to tracking your expenses they eventually fail.

Well said. I did notice that after a while it just becomes second nature. It probably took about a year of earnestly making the effort to track my expenses and then it became so routine it's like brushing your teeth - you just do it without thinking much about it.

I've got a spreadsheet where I track cashflow that's going on about 6-7 years now. Another tab tracks net worth and then I have an annual budget tab for each year where I break down spending into about 25 categories (each utility, rent, clothes, groceries, gas, each insurance, gas, etc.).

I have been using an excel spreadsheet for the last couple years. We make most of our purchases with credit cards to take advantage of cash back and travel rewards so most of our expenses are listed in the purchase history. We also save all the receipts for the month and can then look for the ones that may have been purchased with cash. I also enter our income from our online pay stubs.

I can track our spending, see the income, as well as our savings rate. I have used the information to work on lowering the highest cost areas. I use Personal Capital to track out net worth.

In addition, I have a column to the right of the totals/avg per month that is our estimated spending in retirement. It is interesting to see how our spending today compares with what we expect to spend in retirement (~6 years from now).

Tried a few things but they are all too cumbersome. Now I just automatically invest 65% of my paycheck, put $300 every paycheck in a travel account, and spend the rest without thinking about it. My emergency fund keeps a good buffer, and if I need to "borrow" from it, I just reroute more spending money into it in the subsequent paychecks (leave the 65% automatically invested).

People that feel like they are getting stressed by all the tracking should try moving to a system like this for a couple of months.

It is a long list of dated income minus outgo, it is a de-facto running record that I have projected out to 2020 so in that way it is a budget. Any excess before the next payday gets saved since I can see the expected future expenses and know if there is any risk of shortfall.

This is almost exactly what I do. I don't go out quite that far. 12-18 months at a time with each year getting it's own tab. It will also balance against my checking account. There are a couple of other tabs like long-term bills which is a separate holding account for things like insurance or car tags that are paid yearly or semi-yearly, but budgeted for monthly.